{{Note|Checks at Shields Up are only a valid measure of your router should you have one in the LAN. To accurately evaluate a software firewall, one needs to directly connect the box to the cable modem.}}

{{Note|Checks at Shields Up are only a valid measure of your router should you have one in the LAN. To accurately evaluate a software firewall, one needs to directly connect the box to the cable modem.}}

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==Firewall Guides & Tutorials==

==Firewall Guides & Tutorials==

Revision as of 11:36, 3 January 2013

A firewall is a system designed to prevent unauthorized access to or from a private network (which could be just one machine). Firewalls can be implemented in only hardware or software, or a combination of both. Firewalls are frequently used to prevent unauthorized Internet users from accessing private networks connected to the Internet, especially intranets. All messages entering or leaving the intranet pass through the firewall, which examines each message and allows, proxys, or denies the traffic based on specified security criteria.

The firewalls listed in this article are overwhelmingly based on the iptables program. Consider configuring the iptables process yourself according to its wiki page (listed below) to keep to the The Arch Way.

There are many posts on the forums about different firewall apps and scripts so here they all are condensed into one page - please add your comments about each firewall, especially ease of use and a security check at Shields Up.

Note: Checks at Shields Up are only a valid measure of your router should you have one in the LAN. To accurately evaluate a software firewall, one needs to directly connect the box to the cable modem.

External Firewall Tutorials

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Masquerading-Simple-HOWTO/IP Masq is a form of Network Address Translation or NAT that allows internally networked computers that do not have one or more registered Internet IP addresses to have the ability to communicate to the Internet via your Linux boxes single Internet IP address.

ferm

ferm (which stands for "For Easy Rule Making") is a tool to maintain complex firewalls, without having the trouble to rewrite the complex rules over and over again. ferm allows the entire firewall rule set to be stored in a separate file, and to be loaded with one command. The firewall configuration resembles structured programming-like language, which can contain levels and lists.

Firehol

FireHOL is a language to express firewalling rules, not just a script that produces some kind of a firewall. It makes building even sophisticated firewalls easy - the way you want it. The result is actually iptables rules.

Firetable

Shorewall

The Shoreline Firewall, more commonly known as "Shorewall", is high-level tool for configuring Netfilter. You describe your firewall/gateway requirements using entries in a set of configuration files. Shorewall reads those configuration files and with the help of the iptables utility, Shorewall configures Netfilter to match your requirements. Shorewall can be used on a dedicated firewall system, a multi-function gateway/router/server or on a standalone GNU/Linux system. Shorewall does not use Netfilter's ipchains compatibility mode and can thus take advantage of Netfilter's connection state tracking capabilities.

ufw

Vuurmuur

Vuurmuur Vuurmuur is a powerful firewall manager built on top of iptables. It has a simple and easy to learn configuration that allows both simple and complex configurations. The configuration can be fully configured through an ncurses GUI, which allows secure remote administration through SSH or on the console. Vuurmuur supports traffic shaping, has powerful monitoring features, which allow the administrator to look at the logs, connections and bandwidth usage in realtime.

iptables GUIs

Firestarter

Firestarter is a good GUI for iptables writen on GTK2, it has the ability to use both white and black lists for regulating traffic, it is very simple and easy to use, with good documentation available on their website.